I recently asked the literary critic Alan Jacobs where he finds tragedy in contemporary literature. His response is that the form has left the West and migrated to the global South. In particular, he singled out the Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Ben Okri.
The one American writer whose work I believe rises to tragic stature is Cormac McCarthy, at least in his Border Trilogy, and this is in part because these novels are about the confrontation between American characters and the global South as found in Mexican culture. The protagonists are true American heroes—you might call them the last cowboys, anachronisms surviving into the nuclear age. They are everything cowboys should be: self-reliant, laconic, courageous, attuned to nature, willing to fight for what is just. And when they cross the border into Mexico they become entangled in tragic circumstances from which they cannot extricate themselves.
Take John Grady’s odyssey in the first book, All the Pretty Horses. Displaced from his grandfather’s ranch, he goes to Mexico in search of opportunity—especially if that means working with horses. No sooner does John Grady cross the border than he is confronted by his comic double, a bony youngster named Jimmy Blevins who has run away from an abusive home. When the frightened child-man Jimmy loses his horse during a lightning storm, he is determined to get it back, though the Mexicans who find it are unwilling to give it up. The cost of his ill-fated quest will have terrible consequences not only for himself but also for Grady.
But if John Grady seems to tower above Jimmy Blevins in depth of soul, he pursues a similar quest to fix things, to restore what was lost, even if the cost involves the possibility of violence. McCarthy allows the reader to see Mexico as a place of lawlessness and treachery, and yet there are innumerable small hints that it possesses a generosity and wisdom America lacks. The Americans, individualists who think in terms of property and its restoration, fail to register the hospitality and communalism of the Mexicans. John Grady believes that he loses his paramour, the daughter of the padron on the ranch where he works, thanks to Jimmy Blevins. But in reality he could never have had her: too much history, class, and culture separate them. He cannot fathom the idea that powerful forces beyond his control can only be endured and not fixed.
A broken man at the end of the novel, John Grady wakes one morning, shivering and alone. He sees a group of Mexican peasants. One asks him where his serape is. When John Grady answers that he has none, “The man loosed the blanket from his own shoulders and swung it in a slow veronica and handed it to him.” The word “veronica” here comes from bullfighting, where the toreador swirls the cape around. But of course Veronica (“true icon”) is the traditional name for the woman in the Gospel whose cloth bears the imprint of the suffering Christ on the road to Golgotha. John Grady’s tragedy is that he cannot grasp the tragic sense of life. This man of action cannot see the heroism of the wizened old Mexican ladies kneeling beneath garish statues of the bloody crucified Christ, women who celebrate the Virgin Mary because of her active embrace of suffering. Like Oedipus’s, John Grady’s virtues blind him to his own limitations before the brute order of necessity.
It is precisely here that a true theology of tragedy can begin to take shape. The notion that Christianity is somehow alien to tragedy—that it is simply and straightforwardly “comic” because the resurrection makes for a happy ending—could not be more radically wrong. In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” Hans Urs von Balthasar singles out three essential elements of tragedy: that the good things of the world cannot sustain themselves and are lost; that this places us in a position of contradiction or alienation; and that this condition is bound up with an “opaque guilt,” in which individual moral responsibility cannot account for all suffering, leaving us subject to a mysterious “inherited curse.”
According to von Balthasar, Christ does not banish tragedy but carries it into the heart of God. Christ “fulfills the contradiction of existence . . . not by dissolving the contradiction but by bearing that affirmation of the human condition as it is through still deeper darknesses in finem, ‘to the end,’ as love.”
To go to the end means . . . not only entering total defeat, the total bankruptcy of all earthly power and every project of salvation, but to go to the end of the night of sin, in that descent into hell where the one who dies and the one who is dead come into an atemporal state of being lost, in which no more hope of an end is possible, nor even the possibility of looking back to a beginning. And this as the conclusion of a tragedy of earthly life that itself already stood under the law of contradiction: since God’s omnipotence wished and was able to make itself known ontologically in the Incarnation as powerlessness and unutterable limitation.
This may sound grandly theological, but I would argue that it has the most concrete and far-reaching consequences for the way we experience the world. If faith is to remain true to experience and not become a sentimentalized blindness, it must be permeated by the tragic sense of life. Unless we can believe that God has willingly submitted himself to the harsh necessities of the created order, we will be helpless when those necessities lay us low. We can only lean in to these forces, and know that such a posture is not passivity but action of the profoundest sort. Passion is not passive.
My tutor was right to challenge my reading of King Lear, but is it possible to embrace the fullness of this tragedy and yet see in its darkness an echo of the divine self-emptying? I think so.
For von Balthasar the resurrection is not “in any way a fifth act with a happy ending” but a mysterious affirmation of a love that can bear tragedy to the end. That is why, in the forty days that followed it, Christ was not magically made whole but bore the marks of his passion, and would not rest until we placed our hands—and our hearts—inside them.
Singularly Ambiguous
Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century critic, moralist, and wit, once said of the American revolutionaries: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of [slaves]?” I don’t know what Johnson’s friend, Edmund Burke—a proponent of American independence—said in response, but I rather hope it was: “Touché.”
While I can’t match Johnson’s epigrammatic waggery, I often find myself with similar sentiments these days about those who seek to defend “the West” from its perceived enemies. Whether implicitly or explicitly, these champions of Western civilization believe that in a time of war, terrorism, and uncertainty the only adequate response is that of singular, unswerving affirmation. To be of two minds about the moral condition of Western culture or the political decisions of those who act in its name is perceived as weakness, or a species of self-hatred.
In fairness, there are plenty of intellectuals out there who seem to regard the tradition rooted in Jerusalem and Athens as the equivalent of original sin, the root of all evil. There is no shortage of energy to spin the ideological merry-go-round.
What’s wrong with this picture? The classical and Judeo-Christian visions, as I understand them, are undergirded by two inseparable insights: through reason or revelation universal moral truths can be discerned, but their application in human affairs is a complex process, fraught with dangers and temptations. In other words, the singularity of truth is always shadowed by the ambiguity of the fallen creatures who strive to incarnate it. And so the cardinal sin in each of these cultures was the same, whether it was called hubris or pride: an overconfident singularity. In the real world the paradox is that truths can come into conflict. Because we are not gods but limited beings, the sorting out of these conflicts is an unending task, one that can end in tragedy or modest, provisional victory.
Two of the central poets of the West, Virgil and Shakespeare, explored this paradox in epic stories about political foundings. The Aeneid is concerned with the founding of Rome. Aeneas is a man with an inexorable sense of duty that drives him forward